Great article. I’m a devout Christian who believes rewards in the afterlife are based on morality not religion, and I feel the article missed something important about Christianity. According to this 2021 Pew poll, only 44% of American Christians believe that people who don’t believe in God cannot go to heaven.
I also want to mention that for me and many other devout Christians, the afterlife is relatively unimportant. What matters most is trying to glorify God on earth. That essentially means living with the values EAs aspire to: expanding our moral circle, overcoming cognitive biases to be more productive, and making sacrifices to help people. We know very little about the afterlife, but we know a lot about how God called us to live. We should want to glorify God because we love him, not because we expect a reward. I don’t have statistics on how common this perspective is, but according to that Pew poll 8% of American Christians don’t believe in heaven at all.
Sonia—thanks for your helpful perspective as a Christian, and the link to the Pew poll (which is fascinating, and I recommend others have a look at it.)
It’s helpful to be reminded that there’s a big variety of beliefs within each religion about the relative importance of this life versus an afterlife, and the relative importance of specific religious commandments and practices versus more general moral principles.
In thinking about these issues, I think it’s important to take a very evidence-based approach to understanding the current distributions of religious beliefs and values, including differences between EAs and non-EAs, and the often big differences across countries, cultures, ages, sexes, social classes, education levels, etc.
Great article. I’m a devout Christian who believes rewards in the afterlife are based on morality not religion, and I feel the article missed something important about Christianity. According to this 2021 Pew poll, only 44% of American Christians believe that people who don’t believe in God cannot go to heaven.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/11/23/views-on-the-afterlife/
I also want to mention that for me and many other devout Christians, the afterlife is relatively unimportant. What matters most is trying to glorify God on earth. That essentially means living with the values EAs aspire to: expanding our moral circle, overcoming cognitive biases to be more productive, and making sacrifices to help people. We know very little about the afterlife, but we know a lot about how God called us to live. We should want to glorify God because we love him, not because we expect a reward. I don’t have statistics on how common this perspective is, but according to that Pew poll 8% of American Christians don’t believe in heaven at all.
Sonia—thanks for your helpful perspective as a Christian, and the link to the Pew poll (which is fascinating, and I recommend others have a look at it.)
It’s helpful to be reminded that there’s a big variety of beliefs within each religion about the relative importance of this life versus an afterlife, and the relative importance of specific religious commandments and practices versus more general moral principles.
In thinking about these issues, I think it’s important to take a very evidence-based approach to understanding the current distributions of religious beliefs and values, including differences between EAs and non-EAs, and the often big differences across countries, cultures, ages, sexes, social classes, education levels, etc.